Browser name, version value returns "Netscape"

Question

Using some simple JavaScript, I'm getting what seems to be an incorrect value returned for one of my two pieces of similar code. For browserName I am getting Netscape as the value returned regardless of what browser I test the code on. browserVer, however, seems to return the correct value, shown below using Google Chrome.

browserVer results:

5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5) AppleWebKit/536.30.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.5 Safari/536.30.1

Why is this?

    var browserName = navigator.appName;
    var browserVer = navigator.appVersion;

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '13 at 00:23

3

A quick Google of what navigator.appName actually means returns this MDN page which includes the fact that:

The HTML5 specification also allows any browser to return "Netscape" here, for compatibility reasons.

Instead, you should probably use a browser sniffing library like Modernizr

answered Oct 22 '13 at 00:23

SomeKittens

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Yep, after changing the wording of my search I found the same thing. Thanks for the share re: Modernizr. – phamousphil Oct 22 '13 at 00:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

A better search revealed the answer (Why does JavaScript navigator.appName return Netscape for Safari, Firefox and Chrome?)

"MDN says: "This was originally part of DOM Level 0, but has been since included in the HTML5 spec." See Mozilla documentation here. BTW; that's why this cannot be used for browser detection (maybe only for IE). Browser detection is a BAD practice and you should always avoid it where possible. Do feature detection instead. But if anybody insists on this; they should use the userAgent property instead."

Browser name, version value returns "Netscape"

2 Answers2